Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The Windows Experience Index measures the capability of your computer's hardware and software configuration and expresses this measurement as a score. A higher WEI score generally means that your computer will perform better and faster than a computer with a lower score, especially when performing more advanced and resource-intensive tasks. Each hardware component receives an individual subscore, that helps users understand the capabilities of the hardware. These ratings helps the user in deciding which software to purchase or which hardware component to upgrade.

Although third party developers have been making better benchmarking tools for PCs, many users have come to rely on the WEI score because it gave PC owners a quick way to determine the overall hardware performance of their computer. Unfortunately, this made up only a small set of users. The widespread adoption that Microsoft was hoping never happened, and if no one’s using it there was no strong reasons to keep it alive.

When Microsoft released Windows 8.1 Preview early this month, it was discovered that the Windows Experience Index tool was removed. Previously, users could right-click on the “Computer” icon on the desktop and then click on Properties to view or generate the WEI score. In Windows 8.1, this is missing.

Turns out that Microsoft hasn’t completely removed this feature from Windows 8.1; there is still a way to generate and check the WEI score. Here is how to do it.

Open Command Prompt as administrator. To do this, type CMD on the Start screen, then right-click on the Command Prompt icon and then click on “Run as administrator”. If you are on the desktop, move the mouse pointer to the lower right corner of the screen to evoke the Charms menu. Click on the Search icon and then type CMD. Again, right-click on the Command Prompt icon and then click on “Run as administrator”.

In the elevated prompt, type the following command and press the Enter key:

Winsat formal

This will start the benchmarking operation. Do not use the computer until the computer finishes generating the report. This might take a few minutes.

Now open the following folder: C:\Windows\Performance\WinSAT\DataStore

Double-click on the file titled <date.time>.Formal.Assessment (Initial).WinSAT.XML to open it with the default web browser.

Once the file is opened in the web browser, you can view the system score (base score), memory score (RAM score), CPU score, graphics score, disk score and gaming score (gaming graphics) as indicated in the screenshot below.